YEREVAN, May 18. /ARKA/. Valery Ovsyannikov, director general of VTB Bank (Armenia), speaking Wednesday in Novosti International Press Center, said the bank can’t run the risk of lowering interest rates on loans.

“Banks are ready to lower their interests, but we are not ready to run such a risk,” he said.

Ovsyannikov said that interest rates on loans were going down in the recent months.

“Today we finance good, reliable and large clients at least at 10%, and I think this interest rate will remain unchanged and will hardly to be lowered, since there is certain cost of the resources banks take from markets,” he said.

Businesses want to borrow cheaper money, he said, but banks can’t afford to extend loans at lower interests, since cheap financial resources are taken from international sources.

Speaking about lending to small entrepreneurship, Ovsyannikov said that loans extended to small businesses are too high.

“Small entrepreneurs are not properly protected to do their businesses transparently, to gain clean profits and show them to a bank to convince it to finance them from cheaper resources,” the banker said.

Many banks, he said, have already started lending money at interest rates ranging between 12% and 14%.

According to the central bank’s figures, interest rates on short-term loans extended to legal entities in Armenian drams and foreign currencies were lowered from 13.9% and 10.8% in December 2010 to 12.9% and 10.6% respectively in March 2011.

Interests on loans extended to legal entities in drams and foreign currencies for longer-then-one-year terms were lowered as well – from 14.3% and 12.4% in December 2010 to 13.8% and 11.7% respectively in March 2011. -0---